Roswell's Alien Mortician
Tuesday October 23, 2007 8:46 AM
Glenn Dennis' experience with the Roswell UFO incident began, of all places, in a funeral home. He was working as a mortician at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell, New Mexico when he received a call from the Roswell Army Air Field. The officer on the phone had a hypothetical question. What size were the smallest hermetically sealed caskets the mortuary had to offer, and how long did Dennis think it would take to obtain one? Dennis told the officer he could have one delivered the next day. The officer thanked him, and hung up the phone.
To Dennis's surprise, the officer called back an hour later. What, the officer wondered (again hypothetically), would a mortuary do to preserve a body that had been out in the desert for five days, and how would such preservation affect the body? Dennis explained the mortuary's procedures and what they would do to the body. The officer thanked him, and hung up the phone.
Several hours later Dennis was asked to transport an injured main to the airfield. When he arrived, he saw an ambulance containing what appeared to be wreckage. "It resembled stainless steel," he said, "with a purple hue, as if it had been exposed to high temperature. There was some strange-looking writing on the material resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics." Dennis ran into a nurse he knew, who told him he ought to leave, and he was indeed escorted away from the scene immediately.
The next day Dennis met with the nurse, who told him she'd been asked to take notes during an autopsy. She drew pictures of the bodies she'd seen: four-fingered hairless humanoids with suction-cup fingers and oversized heads. She said the smell was so terrible they had to move the autopsy to an airplane hangar. The nurse gave Dennis the drawings and told him he should never tell anyone her name. The next time Dennis attempted to contact the nurse, he was told she'd been transferred. A letter he wrote to her was returned; it was stamped "DECEASED."
Dennis's story, while a good one, may not be true. Years after the incident, Dennis identified the nurse as Naomi Self; when no nurse by that name was found, he claimed that he was still protecting her identity. But Dennis still has his defenders, and his Roswell UFO Museum is responsible for the alien-head lights lining the streets of the town, securing him a place in Roswell UFO lore if not its history.
Comments (1)
Lee K. Abbott wrote a short story about Glenn, who happens to be his father-in-law, called "The Talk Talked Between Worms," first published in the Georgia Review 50:2. I recall it was a great story, told from the perspective of someone who did not want to be seeing the things he was seeing.
Posted by michaelbrown | October 23, 2007 12:25 PM
Posted on October 23, 2007 12:25